Ida Jackson

Information Officer, Great Norwegian Encyclopedia

Who’s Ida?

Ida is an Information Officer and Web Editor at the Great Norwegian Encyclopedia. She has worked with the redesign, the usability and the content strategy for the website. Ida is a writer by trade, and web writing is her main passion. Before starting her job at the Encyclopedia in 2011, she was kept busy by her weblog and her small social media consultant-company. Ida’s time as a full time blogger resulted in the book Sosiale medier – hvordan ta over verden uten å gå ut av huset.

Ida’s topic

Content strategy on an encylopedia: When less is actually less

How do you turn a former book into great web content? The new editoral staff of http://snl.no inherited all the 200 000 articles from the old paper encyclopedia. It was a cultural heirloom, but quite outdated and not suitable for the web. We used content strategy and web analysis to manage the enormous amount of text. We re-educated the old authors, and managed to turn old books into quality content. But it was not easy. Because when you deal with an encyclopedia, you cannot necessarily shrink the amount of articles to make the product better. Less is actually less.

Audience will learn:

The real difference between content on paper and content on the web and how to trim and transform your own “paper-content” to web content without too much friction.

How we fight aging content in the encyclopedia.

How to get paper-loving academics and writers to write good web content.